Apple’s iPhone Duo, Meta’s Muse AI Agent, Anthropic Researcher Quits Over AI Doom | Diet TBPN

0:01John Coogan:Well, Apple has announced the iPhone Duo, their foldable phone. Big question, right away. How is this going to impact screen time? Does your screen time go twice as fast because you're actually locked in on two screens? Should you do pixel adjusted screen time too? If you're watching a laptop versus an Apple Watch, if I spend an hour on Apple Watch, is that like 15 minutes on the laptop, on the triple monitor setup, getting triple the screen time? We have the AirPods with the cameras. They didn't do that. They haven't announced those. I don't think they're going to. Not yet. Government's been reporting.

0:36But when that comes, that could potentially help you add to your screen time by tracking screens out in the real world that you're seeing. True. They aren't getting picked up. True.

0:44John Coogan:Eventually, it's going to be 24-7 screen time. Everyone's looking at a screen everywhere. There's a screen everywhere. You're looking at the windshield of your car. That's the screen. Can we pull up some real pictures of the Duo? Here it is. Here it is, the Duo. So in this video, there is no crease. I'm sure the YouTube tech reviewers will be hunting in all different lighting for creases. But it feels like Apple waited long enough to avoid a crease whatsoever. So you will get no crease. That is crazy. Sitting there. Boom. It's cool. I think this is going to sell like hotcakes. I think people are ready to spend.

1:21John Coogan:It's going to be like two grand, maybe three grand when you max it out. I think the Apple buyer, the Apple fanboy is ready for something that actually is a flex beyond like a slight upgrade. You paid 30 % more for the Pro. This says you pulled out the big mix. You dropped two grand. Well, and that's been the thing. Relative to how much value you get out of a phone, phones have always been incredibly cheap, even the highest price. Yeah, you spend more time on your phone than you do in your car, and your car is 10 times the price of your phone always, if not more. And so I think this will sell very well.

1:56John Coogan:It'll be interesting to see if any new apps come from this, if people need to redesign stuff. Like we're having Mikey from Suno on the show later today. And Suno has an app that's really full featured for iPhone. You can make songs. You can scroll a feed of other people's songs. But you do have to pop over to desktop if you want to get into their composer and actually deconstruct the song and shift around different pieces of the song. and then you get a sort of GarageBand interface. Even using a lot of normal iPhone apps on iPads, it usually just doesn't feel quite right scrolling. So I think there'll be a couple UI, UX opportunities, challenges, both.

2:36John Coogan:Interesting little bezel there where you can see the screen is curved, but it's on a blocked out, squared off edge there in the center. Two cameras in the back, one on the front. Leaving room for the iPhone Duo Pro. with five cameras or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, it really shows that the phone seems to be, at least the iPhone, is certainly in its final form, right? This feels like the biggest step forward in a long time, and yet it does absolutely nothing new for you. A rave review. Until they do the iPhone newspaper that folds out. It's moderately exciting because we're all, it's moderately exciting because everyone's addicted to their phone, and it's like, cool, new screen.

3:24But it does nothing new for you. It doesn't move humanity forward in any way at all. Jordy, you're going to be able to watch two reels at once, and they're both going to be vertical.

3:33John Coogan:You think so? Yeah. What do you mean? From the demo that I saw, it looked like you put the video up top and then iMessage is hello. Well, that's because that was a horizontal video. I don't think you'll be able to open two copies of Instagram at the same time. No, I think it'll be more like the iPad OS where you can have different windows. So you think you'll be able to do YouTube shorts and Instagram reels side by side? Ideally, hopefully. Ideally. Brainrot, final boss over here wants to do it. And then you can have the third one on the back. It's exciting to see John Turnitz get a big win, like early.

4:04John Coogan:Like first thing as the CEO, first major Apple event, and it's an entirely new product, the foldable phone, something that's been rumored for years. They didn't tee him up just to do a minor iteration. A Mac mini refresh. Exactly. Yeah, it's exciting that he got to come out strong with this. And it's also less of a risk than the Apple Vision Pro. If they'd thrown him there, then he'd be remembered, oh, his first thing was sort of a flop. Yeah, I think this is going to be a hit, even though it doesn't matter at all. I think it's going to sell very well. I think a lot of people are going to buy them for a variety of reasons.

4:41John Coogan:But I think it's just a good way to kick off a really strong decade-long run. Hopefully four decades. Cook couldn't make it to 95 in the seat, but Ternus, I think he got it, what it takes. I want to see Ternus run in this place. So you're 100 % getting the duo? Yeah, I think I'll get it. I'll need to feel how it feels in my hand. But at one point, I was considering carrying an iPad Mini as my daily driver phone. because I was like, so they come with Wi-Fi. 6.8. 6.8, so I have big pockets. So it would actually fit in my pocket. And I don't like the phoned feature of the phone. I don't like getting phone calls.

5:23John Coogan:So you lose that because it doesn't have a cellular connection. So you can never call me. And it's not like you need a phone number for anything else besides calls, like logging into pretty much any service. Yeah, you can do two-factor on an actual authentication app. I think you can get by. You might need to have a Mac mini hooked up somewhere that has a phone number attached to it that can route you two-factor codes or something. But it did seem doable. Or, you know, you just check your phone, your actual phone with the phone number at home later. But every day you just have this, you know, iPad mini that you pull out, and it has a cellular connection.

5:59John Coogan:I don't know that it can actually get phone calls, but it has a cellular connection. So you can get data while you're out and about. So you can be out in the world and scroll real. Data. What else do you need? You don't need to make big data. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, it really comes down to look that the phone is, is lighter, thinner. It's not lighter. It's not thinner. It is probably faster. It's bigger. This is, this is the opposite of your meme. Typically they come out and they say it's lighter, thinner, faster, thinner, faster, thinner, faster, 12 times. It's the best iPhone ever. This is actually a different direction.

6:34John Coogan:This is a response. to your joke. Here's something. Yeah. Would you rather search work and iMessage or be able to get the duo? Search work and iMessage? What do you like? Search and iMessage. Yeah. Oh, you want that to work. Yeah. Personally, I would be excited about functional features of the core software that I use with the iPhone among, you know, many other things. But Kate over on X says, mentally ready for my iPhone to start being slow, laggy, and having a bad battery. You have that to look forward to. Absolutely. So they also updated the normal iPhone. Is that right? Did you watch a little bit of the earlier keynote?

7:12John Coogan:Yeah, I already said. That one is thinner, lighter, faster, better, stronger, all the different things. They updated Apple Intelligence a bunch. Oh, yeah. I thought they haven't launched it yet. I thought this was the launch of the Siri. It's actually going to go out now. Correct, yes. Yeah, this was in the launch video. Okay. And also the old iPhone, or not the old iPhone, but the new normal iPhone, 18, they were like, oh, the battery is much better. So all those things that Jordy said about the new iPhone. I don't know. It'll be interesting. I'm excited to get it in hand, see how it works. I don't, it might be too much to open that thing up.

7:51John Coogan:I'm thinking like, it's pretty easy just to swipe up. No, for you it's great because you're such a newspaper guy. I do like a newspaper. Put your feet up on the desk and fold your phone open. I'm scrolling. Yeah, something like that might make sense. I don't know. I don't know. I was reflecting on Steve Jobs. I saw a viral video about Steve Jobs predicting Chachipiti in 1985. And the video is incredible because he arrives to this talk. He's giving a talk at a university on the future. It's just Steve Jobs' view of the future in 1985. And he arrives on a helicopter with an entourage. And they all get out of this helicopter and they go into this.

8:27John Coogan:It's amazing.

8:31John Coogan:but uh more of a where is it king in the castle king in the castle because the video kind of takes kind of takes place in the castle because you got to watch steve jobs in 1985 predict modern ai pretty well and i read this i became immensely jealous uh and i think i would have enjoyed that a great deal. So pause. He's the lead into this. He's saying, I'll just read the transcript. He says, did you know that Alexander the Great's tutor for 14 years was Aristotle? When Alexander the Great had a question, he would just go to Aristotle. I think we can play the clip from the beginning now. Alexander the Great's tutor was for about 14 years.

9:18You know, Aristotle. Aristotle. And I read this, I became immensely jealous. And I think I would have enjoyed that a great deal. And through the miracle of the printed page, I can at least read what Aristotle wrote without an intermediary. And maybe if there's a professor, they can add to that. But at least I can go directly to the source material. And that is, of course, the foundation upon which our Western civilization is built.

9:49John Coogan:Glazing the printing press. But I can't ask Aristotle a question. I mean, I can, but I won't get an answer. And so... Perfectly timed soundboard. My hope is that in our lifetimes, we can make a tool of a new kind, of an interactive kind. And so my hope is someday, when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying worldview of that Aristotle in a computer. And someday some student will be able to not only read the words Aristotle wrote, but ask Aristotle a question and get an answer. And that's what I hope that we can do. It's so crazy. He's just like, we got to compress all the data down and be able to give it a conversational interface.

10:40Large language models with a simple interface that anyone can use.

10:44John Coogan:It's a crazy, crazy prediction. 40 something years ago. Steve Jobs is probably the most famous techno optimist, the most successful techno optimist. The bicycle for the mind quote, that one continues to hit constantly. But you can see his excitement every time he gives a keynote. He'll just be on stage like giddily testing GarageBand. But his delivery there too is something really, really special. I mean, you notice that, right, where he asks a hypothetical question. Then, you know, well, I could ask, but I wouldn't get an answer. And he kind of like lets the laugh line kind of land and lets the audience.

11:21John Coogan:He has really good time. He's basically the Mark Gurman of CEOs. Mark Gurman is the GOAT. Yes. Journalist. Yes. And Steve is one of the greatest, you know, founder CEOs ever. It's just really, really cool timing. I'm surprised it took you that long. to him because i thought you were talking about mark german's comedic timing which is fantastic but uh mark german's delivery of apple truly he truly has apple intelligence and his delivery so yeah uh i mean you can see uh ben thompson's called this out a few times but when steve jobs introduces garage band he is just so excited about this product you can see him in this one video introducing GarageBand 1.0 with John Mayer, which is really cool.

12:08John Coogan:He has John Mayer come out and just play some stuff on the guitar. This is where I want to show you loops. And I'm going to show you what a non-musician can do with loops. And he's just chilling there on this computer, on this stool, using this tool. And just doing a live demo. And if you scroll forward about halfway, you'll see John Mayer comes in and plays some songs. Toward the end. There you go. It's a British invasion. He's just having fun. And so, you know, with the power of modern LLMs, like you can ask an AI version of Steve Jobs, what would he think about AI? I did. And I think the answer is somewhat interesting.

12:53John Coogan:He said, probably yes, with very strong opinions about what makes AI worth using. That's speculation, but his own words give us a surprisingly good basis for it. In 1985, Jobs imagined computers capturing a thinker's underlying ideas so that a student could interact with them. You could actually ask Aristotle a question. He was already enthusiastic about something resembling a central promise of conversational AI, but his enthusiasm would come with three demands in this hypothetical Steve Jobs analysis. One, you got to give people new abilities. Learning, designing, composing, building would probably excite him most.

13:30John Coogan:Two, you have to make it effortless. I'd expect him to push for AI that understands what you want with minimal instruction. And three, you have to make something excellent. I suspect he'd value AI's ability to help someone realize an original vision much more than its ability to produce enormous quantities of generic content. He would be anti-slop, but pro-AI. Aristotle also had an interesting AI take in this imagined LLM version of Aristotle. He'd care more about what AI does to our character than how intelligent becomes. The conclusion of this is Aristotle would favor AI as an instrument of human flourishing while resisting the idea that a life requiring less human effort is automatically a better life.

14:15John Coogan:You must continue to create. You must continue to work. You will be unsatisfied if the robots are doing everything. Create more than you consume. Yeah, exactly. It seems pretty clear that Steve Jobs would be excited about AI or some form of AI, but what would the reaction to that be in the modern era? Because I tend to think that there would have been the natural cycle of reaction because of there's a whole host of things, political polarization, economic stagnation, wealth inequality, negativity bias in social media. There's so many different incentives that the desire, the impetus to tear someone down is unavoidable.

14:55John Coogan:And so I think we would be in this weird era where a lot of people would be excited about that particular vision for AI. And yet there would still be viral videos complaining about the latest Steve Jobs keynote. But what do you think? Because you've called for like the Steve Jobs of AI, someone who's an optimist, someone who talks about empowering humanity, focus on human flourishing, agrees with the Aristotelian philosophy around AI. But what would the actual reaction be? Is that actually a panacea or would it fall by the wayside like all other attempts at positivity seem to have fallen by the wayside?

15:33I've come around to the technology itself being fundamentally scary, even though it's very cool. and then you factor that in with certain actors that are trying to position it as even more scary than maybe it is inherently. And I think even if we still had Steve with us, it would still be a mess, and he might be nicely counter-positioned, but it doesn't stop other people from poisoning.

16:01John Coogan:Maybe not. Maybe not. Poisoning the discourse. What do you think his P-Doom would be? Over or under 10 %? 1%. Probably. He seems like a 1 % guy. He's the 1%. Wall Street Journal, they didn't talk about math. It made it to the digital version, didn't make it into the paper. Navier Stokes did not make the paper edition of the Wall Street Journal. But Meta and their new personal AI agent did. It's right here. Meta launches. The absolute state of traditional media. Hey, this is probably. Probably it's more profitable as a business perspective, right? What are you going to do? Sell math theories? Navier Stokes was a$1 million price.

16:46John Coogan:You don't think Alex Wang can pull a million bucks out of this? This could be a trillion-dollar price. They haven't monetized it yet, but they've got to put ads in this thing. And will they do agentic commerce? What will they do? We were very excited talking to Sufenator yesterday about AGI for small businesses, for folks who run ads on Meta. I still love that idea, but they're going a different direction. They're doing personal superintelligence. Zuck's been talking about this for a year at least. He's put out a lengthy blog post about how he wants AI to diffuse, how he wants everyone to have AI.

17:23John Coogan:And now everyone does with the MetaMuse app. That's a separate app that you get that will book restaurants for you. The Wall Street Journal has a little bit of a story here. MetaPlatforms is betting that making AI agents easy to use will get mainstream consumers to start adopting them in their daily lives. The company on Tuesday announced a new personal AI agent that can buy goods online. I think they partnered with Stripe on Link. So I don't know if that just means that when link is enabled on a particular checkout, it'll be a little bit smoother, or if it's like it's going to try and steer you towards things that are linked.

18:01John Coogan:It can respond to emails. And so do you have to link it to your Gmail, I guess, to get that working? And complete other tasks users authorize it to do for them. The agent called Muse is accessible via dedicated app. users operate the agent by conversing with it like a typical chatbot and can choose their own names for it. I saw some really funny ones. Tyler called his Mark. I saw someone else that's... someone gave it a really funny name like they said like you can pick one and then the name of the agent was just you can pick one or something like that. A bunch of funny hallucinations always happens with these products.

18:42John Coogan:Everyone's gonna have fun with them. The new tool is Meta's latest attempt to monetize its massive AI investments, which are expected to top$130 billion this year. The AI agent is free to access for most of what people need and has two tiers of subscription plans for power users,$100 a month and$20 a month. Anthropic and OpenAI have quickly built multi-billion dollar businesses around agents capable of performing complex computer tasks, but most of that usage is driven by software coding or other business applications. Consumer adoption of technology lags behind offering meta apple and other companies potential for catching up the fact that we've given such a powerful technology in a package that is going to be really digestible for the product is one of the things that will set us apart from lots of other agentic products metas ai chief alex wang said in an interview ben thompson was raving about the fact that it gives you a pretty powerful vm eight gigs of memory and eight gigs of storage that is yours sequestered.

19:43John Coogan:And they're also implementing a lot of the security features that they have done with WhatsApp, where there's end-to-end encryption. Yeah, they got Moxie pulled into it, apparently. That's really cool. Moxie's a legend. So great on the recruiting front. Everyone loves Signal. And great team there. Yeah, the question is how, it sounds like if they're actually giving every user a computer. VM, but yeah. It's like virtualized. But yes, serious computing resources. Yeah, yeah. But the cost is going to probably be pretty significant. So the VM most likely spins up when you use it and then take it down when you're not using it.

20:23John Coogan:So the actual compute hours that are associated to anyone but a power user, and of course, very quickly you can wind up spending$20 or$100, and that's enough to just pay for a virtual machine. You can go and rent a true virtual machine to host your website on DigitalOcean for$20. So Kaz, the CEO of Opendoor, went to X and posted a screenshot of him asking Meta AI in WhatsApp. And he said, please make WhatsApp the main interface for these things, Alex Wang, please. And he just says, how do I use Muse? And Meta AI responds, Muse is a free AI assistant from Anthropic. You can use it on the web, on mobile, or through their API.

21:02Go to clod.ai, create an account, log in. So I'm looking at this post. I'm trying to find why is nobody talking about how Meta AI thinks that Muse is a product from Anthropic and is telling people to go log in there?

21:15John Coogan:That is weird that it would hallucinate that Muse is from Anthropic because there's not even any connection between those. It's not like Anthropic ever had a product called Muse that I know of. Very odd. But Meta AI, of course, is running an older LLM. And then I believe you still get thrown into a LLM model, I think, when you're on Instagram, if you wind up in an LLM chat. And so there's going to need to be unification around all of these different products, and they're going to need to eventually talk to all the same models. But, of course, there's like scaling and all sorts of different issues that you need.

21:48John Coogan:because some of these products that they've gotten to scale are pretty significant, even if they're not the most talked about. When you are a hyperscaler with billions of users and you vend an LLM into something, you've deployed that at scale. It's doing a lot. And it's like the new Gemini 3.7 Flash, bunch of great reviews, great benchmarks on things. But they can't just stuff that in Google search on day one. Like they have to actually scale it up. Yeah. The question I have is, does it seem like this was something they were working on prior to Instinct gaining traction? Or is this an Instinct clone?

22:29I saw one post that was saying, you know, a rumor that they tried to buy it, which makes sense.

22:35John Coogan:R4Rock says there's a rumor going around that Meta and others made a 10-figure offer for Instinct. That's a crazy valuation for a one-year-old company, something like that. No, less. burnt it down. Now Meta has launched Muse. And that's literally what the post is. Meta has launched Muse and now the timeline is reacting. It'll be a big deal. Sounds familiar. Yes, Meta was able to win stories. How did they do that? They didn't win by launching a Snapchat clone as a separate app. They won by putting it in Instagram, which already had the install base. And so if Muse works its way into Instagram, which a lot of people do use, it'll probably get a lot of adoption.